Christian Pescher

Dr. Christian Pescher studied business economics with focus on statistics and marketing at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as speech science at the University of Regensburg. During his studies, he completed semesters abroad in Chile, Brazil, and Mexico. He graduated from the University of Passau and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich on the topic “Social Networks in Marketing and Innovation”. Following his graduation, he completed a research visit at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USA). Before accepting the junior professorship for digital marketing at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, he worked for the Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG and was responsible for the planning and reporting in Europe. Currently, he teaches and researches at the Universidad de los Andes in Chile.

Idea Screening in Crowdsourcing

The basic idea behind crowdsourcing is to outsource internally conducted activities to a large crowd of anonymous users on the internet, the so-called “crowd”. This enables organizations to access the diverse and heterogenic knowledge of a large number of people. A popular field of use for crowdsourcing is ideation. Ideation consists of two phases: idea generation and idea selection. While generating a large amount of ideas is unproblematic, the selection phase utilizes evaluation through other participants (potential conflict of interests) or experts (cognitively prone to mistakes with large amounts of ideas).

The research project will identify both the pre-inventive thought-structures of the participants, with the use of semantic networks as well as freely available information-structures from the internet. Based upon the results of former crowdsourcing-competitions, patterns which differentiate good from bad ideas will be presented. This enables an automation of the idea-selection process.